


Reflections

by kethni



Category: Veep (TV)
Genre: F/M, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-24 08:53:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21096758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kethni/pseuds/kethni
Summary: For CrazyMaryT who asked for "an angsty reflection thing for that night he finds out Sue's married. It doesn't last long because he has a crisis to go deal with."





	Reflections

It shouldn’t have surprised him. It’s what happened. It was what normal people did wasn’t it? They met someone at a party or in a bar or whatever, they dated, and they got married. Quite often they had children. Quite often they got divorced. Presumably the last two facts were not connected.

Sue was normal. She had told him very firmly that she was normal, and he was a grotesque parody of normal and she WAS SICK OF IT.

He had told her how difficult it was for him to connect with people. How hard he had worked on his social skills. How much it hurt when people called him weird, strange, or robotic.

He’d been dumped before. More often than he had done the dumping, if truth be told. It took a lot to convince him that a relationship wasn’t worth saving. That the pain of being together wasn’t a fair cost for offsetting the misery of being alone.

Her cruelty was unnecessary. It was painful enough that she ended their relationship. Her viciousness, her anger, and her insults were entirely redundant. There was almost a masochism to continuing to work for Selina when Sue was present.

He knew that she’d been dating. She was a serial monogamist, jumping from one boyfriend to another, with as little interval as possible. It didn’t seem healthy.

Ha.

He knew the statistics. Being a single man over sixty was unhealthy. More than that, he knew in himself how unhealthy it was. He knew, with a kind of clinical detachment, that he was becoming more asocial. It had happened before, but that had been as a natural consequence of rejection and disappointment. When your social interactions were less successful than you hoped more often then you wanted it was natural to withdraw.

Squiring Sue to family events had been some of the happiest time of his life. He was well aware, intensely aware even, that his family talked about his inability to form long-term romantic connections. He was a disappointment to his mother and a curiosity to the rest of his family.

He was older now and more hardened to his own failures. It still hurt of course. Even a polite rejection was still a rejection, and there was no shortage that were anything but polite. A rejection no longer sent him under his bedcovers for hours on end.

He was over Sue. Over her rejection. Over her cruelty and her lack of empathy. He was just tired. The thought of making an effort to meet someone was wearying. The thought of going through an app or a website over and over until someone found him interesting, of mostly failing to make small talk, of finally perhaps persuading someone to meet him for coffee, only for them not to connect… it was exhausting.

Their first date had, of course, been her choice. Not coffee, which would have been his choice, not a nice meal, not even a concert. She had asked for a trip to the opera; something in which he had no particular interest, and which it turned out she didn’t enjoy as much as she expected.

There was someone for everyone, his sister said. She said it, he was sure, primarily to annoy him. There was certainly no sensible basis to believe that anyone had any kind of “soulmate.” The odds that you would ever meet that one person in the billions of people on earth were astronomical. Also, the idea that every single human being was unique in such a way as to only fit with one other person was ludicrous. There were only so many personality traits and so many beliefs. The amount of combinations was fixed and finite.

In a way, it was reassuring. It should have meant that there were potentially hundreds of thousands of people who would be a good match. Nonetheless in his darker moments he sometimes wondered his potential matches were all hiding on the moon.

People talked about being “seen.” About inclusivity. Kent understood that. The world was moving on and progressing. That was a good thing. A positive thing. It was a thing that he didn’t recognise as relating to him.

Perhaps it would’ve been easier if Sue had been less bitter. By any metric she had come out of the relationship breakup better than he had. She had moved on. She was married. What was “moving on” if not getting married? She had no reason to be angry at him and yet she clearly was. She took every opportunity possible private opportunity to insult him and now, it seemed, that she was taking all possible opportunities to drill home the fact that she had a husband.

She had ended things. If anyone had any right to be angry and bitter, it was him. He had every right. But he wasn’t. He hadn’t been for a long time. When she sneeringly implied that he was boring he was injured, not irate. He had tried not to show it. He worked very hard at it.

And it was hard.

It couldn’t last. It wouldn’t last. He knew that. She was younger than he was. More confident than he was. Certainly, more demanding than he was. The older Kent got, the less he expected from his relationships. A lifetime of disappointment had a way of doing that.

Kent was not an introspective man. Nonetheless, he had no illusions that he was over Sue. Nobody could irritate him with a simple look as deeply or intensely as she could. She was inflexible, intolerant, self-aggrandising, and self-important.

He knew very well that she remained his ideal woman.

‘What the fuck are you doing in here with the door closed?’ Ben demanded. ‘We’re got a fucking emergency.’

Kent stood up. ‘If course we do. There’s always an emergency.’

Ben gave him a look. ‘After work I’m going for a drink. You in?’

‘You’re always going for a drink after work,’ Kent said.

‘Yeah, but you need one,’ Bed said. ‘Or five.’

Kent put his hands on his hips. ‘You may be right.’

The End


End file.
